


In Fire

by rachelindeed



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, The Dutch Steamship Friesland, UST, derring-do on the ocean blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 20:44:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/pseuds/rachelindeed
Summary: Some say the world will end in fire. But not today.





	In Fire

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve always wanted to take a crack at the adventure of the Dutch steamship _Friesland_ , which so nearly cost them both their lives. So here, have some derring-do on the ocean blue, with a bit of added ridiculousness and UST courtesy of the Ritchie verse! The plot of the story was inspired by real maritime disasters, particularly the Texas City explosions of 1947 and the Halifax explosion of 1917. And since I always enjoy starting Ritchie fics with the most outrageous bits of canon possible, I’ve borrowed the Dundas case from the beginning of Doyle’s _A Case of Identity._
> 
> Thank you so much to BrosleCub12 for the beta and encouragement!

The false teeth flew toward Mrs Dundas with unexpected speed. Her toothless husband, though approaching his seventy-third year, had apparently once been a first-rate bowler on the cricket pitch. Instantly rising and extending myself across the dinner table in a clean arabesque, I winced as a pair of yellowed incisors slapped against my palm. Completing my turn, I tossed the unsanitary mess into the coal scuttle and considered it a job well done.

"We shall see you in court, Mr Dundas," I proclaimed. "The eccentric nature of your attacks shall not shield you from their consequences. Mrs Dundas, my colleague and I will happily serve as witnesses on your behalf. I assure you no jury in the nation will deny you a separation order under these conditions."

I cast a glance toward Watson, anticipating his reaction. Though he knew the case was a domestic one, I had not warned him of its peculiarities beforehand. If he truly wished to be party to my confidences, he should learn to look less delightful in surprise.

His gaze, however, was focused beyond me, directed through the window at my back. Distracted and frowning, he said slowly, "That smoke. Should not be…orange."

I pivoted on my heel and looked through the east window to the sky above the docks. After a drawn-out moment, I understood what I was seeing. The suffocation of cold horror was not unlike the roar of ocean water closing overhead with its strange, twinned sensation of dislocated weight and violent pressure. A part of my brain began to count my breaths.

"Holmes?" Watson's hand caught at my sleeve. "For heaven's sake, what is it?" 

I would need him; the whole town would need him. But would to God I had left him safe at home.

"Mrs Dundas," I ordered, "take your wretched husband with you to the cellar at once. Do not venture out for anything until you receive word that all is well." I looked into her eyes, startled but clear, and let her see my fear. "As you value your lives, do as I tell you. Quickly, Watson. _Quickly!_ " 

We ran the mile to the docks, though at fifty-one I could no longer draw such advances on my body's reserves without paying a stinging price. My knees were protesting at half the distance. Watson's leg must have hurt him far worse, but he kept pace.

A gawking crowd had gathered at the quay as fresh plumes of ochre and yellow billowed up from the docked ship now visible through the haze. Block letters across her bow proclaimed her the _Friesland_ , a cargo hauler of Dutch origin, though she flew the Union Jack. She sat like a lowering dragon, the internal flames devouring her still hidden inside her hold, while the sea boiled around her. The waves lapping into her hull dissolved instantly into steam and rose whitely along her flanks. She was a quiet monster, winged in colour.

"Once more for Harry, England, and St George," Watson whispered, just as the ship's captain told his crew to make ready to steam the hold.

"Do _not_ steam the hold!" I bellowed, charging through the crush and into the last dozen yards of open space that the onlookers must have deemed a safe distance. "Captain, belay that order!" 

The officer looked down at me, taken aback. He was young for his command. His ship was a hardy tramp steamer, near a hundred meters' length. Sitting low in the water, she had clearly been loaded almost to capacity before the flames erupted. Barely out of his twenties, this red-faced young man must have seen his promising career going up in flames along with his cargo, and it would be all the worse for him if he could not smother the fire before it gutted the ship beyond repair. "Clear off, ye bounder!" he shouted. 

I waved this off impatiently. "Your cargo is ammonium nitrate, the colour of the smoke proclaims as much. Once set aflame, it generates its own oxygen which steam cannot douse! If you flood the hold with steam you will only increase both the heat and the pressure trapped inside, and those are the two factors required to trigger an explosion!"

"Explosion? To the devil with ye!" he yelled. "It is only fertiliser we have aboard, not munitions. We are no warship. Who are ye to spread such lies?"

"I am a _chemist!_ ” 

"He is _Sherlock Holmes!_ " Watson's voice rang across the dock, urgent and clear, and I could hear the collective gasp that caught in a hundred throats.

Thank heaven the captain's was among them. He stared at me with wide eyes, the instinctive trust of a bond forged in childhood overtaking his expression. He knew me only through Watson's stories, I was sure, but the memory of those double columns of cheap print was about to save our lives. "Belay that order!" he shouted over his shoulder, then turned back to me with his hat in hand.

I took a deep breath and broke the news to him. "The fertiliser you carry is harmless in almost all situations, but an enclosed fire is the terrible exception. It is no reflection on you, sir, that you are not familiar with its perils; they are not yet widely understood. But I have spent my life in chemical researches. I give you my word that at this moment you are standing atop the largest bomb ever made by man, however unintentionally. If we cannot put out the fire, the ship will explode, and I believe it will raze every building in a three kilometer radius."

I could see the concussive blast play out behind my eyelids -- the immolation of a thousand buildings, the rain of molten iron falling from the sky, the tidal wave capsizing all the ships in sight of the harbour. The black, volcanic cloud mushrooming upward from the point of detonation.

On the deck, the captain stood paralyzed with shock. Behind me, the bystanders in earshot began to panic and scuffles broke out as the first offshoots of the crowd broke away at a run. 

Beside me, Watson bent over as if winded, bracing his hands on his knees. After a minute, he straightened up, a subtly different man. He tucked himself away beneath the familiar air of determination that he had worn carefully at twenty-nine, naturally at thirty-seven, and luminously at fifty-three. He stepped forward and waved over two of the shaking crewmen who were not actively engaged in fighting the fire. 

"You," he pointed, "run to the railway depot. You must send a message down the line to stop all incoming trains. Repeat it until you get acknowledgement from every station between here and Birmingham. You, find a working wireless and warn off all incoming ships. Any heading this direction must divert their course, and those still manned inside the harbour must attempt to get out."

He turned to me, grimacing but calm. "How do we extinguish the fire?” 

I was running scenarios through my mind, death upon death and ruin upon ruin, but he interrupted tersely. "Talk it through. You know that helps."

I paced along the dock, vaguely aware of gesturing wildly. The shouts and confusion of the fleeing crowd behind us had faded into nothing as my mental landscape claimed the foreground. "It is beyond the resources of the crew or the volunteer fire brigade; their pumps are not strong enough to hose the hold with sufficient force to flood it. Their efforts will only make matters worse, as large portions of the water they do manage to spray in will be vaporised, pushing the pressure towards its critical mark. Heat alone will never ignite the blast, but combined with compression it is deadly.

“If I could tear the hold open, I would, but it would take the tools and manpower of a shipyard to cut open the hull or the deck, and we haven't time for it in any case. 

"The best and most obvious answer is that we must sink the ship." I ignored the poor captain's cry of dismay. "But how can we do it in a manner that ensures an even flood? We might find some rocks to ram her on, but suppose she beaches instead of sinks? And even if she did sink, the irregular gouges left by the rocks would almost guarantee an imbalanced flood. If the ship were to be dragged fully underwater while air pockets remained inside and the fire still burned, the sudden increase of water pressure from all sides would trigger the detonation."

I came to a stop, my eyes closed, surrounded by tense silence. At last I spotted a scenario that did not end in certain disaster. "I think we must capsize her. A one hundred and eighty degree roll; put her keel above water and her funnels below. Let gravity work for us and dump all the burning cargo down toward the incoming water, while reducing the external pressure by rotating the bulk of the hold until it rises above the sea. I don't know if it will work, but that is the best chance I can see."

"If that is the best chance you can see, then that is the best chance there is," Watson said. "We must find a tugboat and haul her out and over if we can." He looked up at the officer still standing on deck, nodding to him in a gesture of respectful commiseration. "Captain, it is a responsibility I cannot envy you, but I hope you will agree that, with so many lives at stake, our duty is clear. Please evacuate your crew and allow my friend and me to attempt this maneuver."

The young man, miserable but resolute, answered, "I'll not only allow ye, but assist ye, sirs. All I ask is that ye stand up for me in court, should we live to see the day. Jenkins," he called to a crewman who was clutching a nearby rail and coughing deeply. "Run to Henderson's. Tell him we're taking _Iris_ for an emergency."

"And then get him and his family into the nearest cellar and stay there," I added. 

"All hands, abandon ship!" the captain called. "Clear off, lads, and spread the warning to as many houses as you can. Gentlemen," he climbed down, "I am at your service."

"The _Iris_ , then, quickly." 

"Do either of ye sail?"

My firm 'no' overlapped with Watson's prompt 'yes.' I stared at him. "Do you really, Watson?"

As we ran along the waterfront on the captain's heels, Watson dredged up a grin. "Do you mean to say that after twenty-four years there remains one corner of my life that you never deduced?"

"But when on earth did you learn? And why?"

"Harry was a navy lad. Went to sea when he was twelve." Oh, I was nettled to have missed that, of all things. "I lived for his letters back then, and read every sea story I could get my hands on."

"You do realise, Watson, that yellow-backed novels are not reliable guides to real sailing?"

He huffed. "If you'd ever paid them attention as anything but doorstops, you might have noticed they're almost all written by sailors. The plots may be boilerplate, but the shipboard details are perfectly correct. In any case, I spent my share of summers working on deck for one steamer or other." 

His hands had never told me that story. But then, those childhood summers had been over-written with the calluses of medicine and the scars of war long before he came to me. 

Ahead of us, the captain jumped aboard a blue-bottomed tug secured to its mooring post by no more than a rope. I followed, and as soon as Watson's boots hit the deck behind me, I added, "That does finally explain your addiction to nautical melodrama in fiction."

"Am I not fully supplied with every other kind of melodrama in fact?"

I was in no position to argue.

Being too unfamiliar with the mechanisms of the boat to be of much use on deck, it was decided I should devote my efforts to shoveling coal for the steam engine. Watson accompanied me to the boiler room and checked that I knew my business. 

In my turn, I issued my last instructions for him to relay to the captain. "Try to put as much distance as you can between ship and shore before attempting to sink her -- it may save lives even if our attempt goes wrong. But I doubt we'll have time to get three kilometers out to sea before the fire reaches its crisis. Keep a close eye on the _Friesland_ as you pull for the open water. If you see her hatches spontaneously burst open, it's a sign the internal pressure is exhausting its last escape routes, like the steam in a screaming kettle. You must take that as your final warning, and delay no longer. 

“I'm sure the captain will know best how to pull the ship off balance -- a sharp enough turn might be enough to do it -- and the fire will have destroyed the ropes and nets that secured the cargo. Once she starts to lean, everything left in the hold will slide sideways, weighting the roll and pushing the center of gravity further off-kilter. With the help of physics and a bit of luck, we shall make her turn turtle, I'm sure."

"You think of everything," Watson said, affectionate and quiet. "Almost." He caught me gently by the arm, and I realised I must have overlooked something terribly important.

"When the _Friesland_ begins to roll, we'll disengage the tether, naturally," he said. "But as she rotates into the water she will throw up massive waves. We shall be straight in their path, and this tug was not designed to withstand such turbulence. It is too small, too harbour-bound, too easily thrown over." He met my eyes frankly. "We are going to capsize, too. You must come up to the deck as soon as you feel us swerve to starboard. We'll all jump off together and start swimming for the shore. But depending on how quickly one or both ships sink, we may well be caught in their wake and dragged down alongside them."

I had known from the moment I recognised the smoke that I would probably lose him today, but standing face to face with that likelihood was unacceptable. "Oh, cheer up Watson," I scolded. "We may yet blow up before we drown."

He laughed, short and sharp, and swatted me with his hat. "Right, then," he said. "I'll see you on the bridge for the moment of truth." 

I kept my tone light. "Given that we will most likely perish within the hour, it would be remiss of me not to mention that since my soul was mistress of her choice, and could of men distinguish her election, she hath sealed thee for herself."

"Stop talking rot," he smiled, equally light, and then scuttled our pretenses and pulled me into him. I felt his cheek brush the hinge of my jaw in passing. If I shook, he did not mention it.

We stood close, lightly embraced. I traced the barest edge of my thumbnail across his wrist, and moved my lips to his ear. "There is no end I could imagine more congenial to me than this."

His hand tightened hard at the crook of my elbow in reproach and caress. "Stoke the boiler, please," he muttered, eyes averted, and turned for the doorway.

"Watson," I called. He paused with his back to me, head half-turned and tilted to show he was listening. I smiled. "I do believe this is the most dangerous thing we've ever done together."

His eyes narrowed, but his mouth tipped, wry and sweet. "No, it isn't. That's just your memory going."

**

Improbably, it all came off like clockwork.

We were a sorry sight by the time the captain -- good man! -- and I managed to hoist Watson high enough that he could get a good grip on the pier. His left leg and right arm had given out almost as soon as we hit the water, his old wounds flaring and cramping in response to the sudden chill. The three of us had made slow progress, swimming arm in arm with Watson supported in the center as we fought our way to shore. Behind us the _Iris_ foundered and dropped quickly to her grave, but the _Friesland_ lingered through its awkward death throes. Keel up, still plumed in vivid smoke and hissing heat through its open hatches, it hunkered like a wounded beast, defeated.

Our efforts went so well, in fact, that the chief problem facing us would be proving -- in the absence of any explosion -- that a horrific disaster had in fact been immanent. Unfortunately, from the outside our heroic actions closely resembled a very massive and expensive act of vandalism, or possibly piracy.

Our poor captain could think of little else once we were all back on dry land. He sat hunched in on himself with his head in his hands, contemplating the endless lawsuits of our future. "My dear man," I told him, "pray do not distress yourself. Considering the alternatives, how can we be anything less than profoundly grateful to have reached this happy outcome against all odds? You may recall from Dr Watson's stories, sir, that I have a brother whose influence in government is not inconsiderable. I give you my word that he will ensure that your finances and your career will be enhanced, rather than damaged, by your noble actions. In addition, please accept my deepest gratitude. I consider myself at your service and in your debt." 

It was humbling to see the pride and comfort he took in my words. 

The evening had grown late before Watson and I found ourselves before the fire at Baker Street once more. All the brandy, dry clothes, fresh towels, and warm blankets we could wish for were at hand, though I suspected nothing could save us both from massive head colds at this stage. I lifted my glass to him. "Surely this will be a crowning adventure for your annals, my dear Watson. We have saved more lives today than in the entirety of our previous career." 

"Marvelous." He snorted, phlegmatic. "That would make this an excellent time to retire." 

I threw a wet sock in his direction. "Enough of your badgering! How many times must I tell you, men do not retire at my age." 

"They do if they are rich, decrepit, and likely to be murdered on the job. I must congratulate you on achieving all three at such an auspicious stage in life." 

"Oh hush. We cannot retire." I shifted fussily in my chair. "What would we do with ourselves all day?"

The hum of bees in lavender flitted across my mind unbidden. It cast a momentary spell, but I was distracted by the flutter of Watson's eyelash, gold in the firelight as he looked at me. 

"I sometimes wonder," he said.

I gritted my teeth against the sharp, uncertain bloom of heat.


End file.
